Lab Members

Carlos F. Lopez Ph. D.: My formal training has been in the fields of chemistry, physics, biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular cell biology with a unique emphasis on the development and application of modeling techniques. I apply my skill-set in cell molecular and systems biology with a focus in cancer research. Given my training from atomic interactions to continuum-cellular interactions I am deeply interested in how events that take place at one space-time scale (e.g. quantum interactions) have an effect on the interactions at the macroscale. From this perspective, cancer biology is a perfect area of application to my theoretical interests due to its inherent multi-scale properties. At the same time, I believe a thorough understanding of cancer development and progression necessitates the development of a multi-scale theoretical foundation that can account for events such as DNA/genomic level aberrations (atomic space and time scales), protein malfunctions, and others, and their propagation to proteins (molecular scales), organelles, cells, and ultimately organs. My driving hypothesis is that understanding the events involved in cancer at multiple scales and developing theories and models to explore cancer biology from systems perspective are key to developing novel successful cancer treatments. This goal is quite ambitious, and I am approaching it by initially focusing on cell signaling pathways that exhibit dysregulation in cancer phenotypes. I also work on trying to provide a novel theoretical understanding of cancer progression that, in turn, will open new possibilities for targeted treatments.